" you
need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it."

After
spending ten years to make more than 300 pictures of New York City,
Berenice Abbott turned to science. She knocked on the doors of scientists,
telling them, "You scientists are the worst photographers in the
world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one
to do it." (Kay Weaver and Martha Wheelock, Berenice Abbott, A
View of the 20th Century, Ishtar Films, 1992) She invented what she
needed as she worked, developing cameras and equipment like specialized
tripods as well as techniques. After the Russian space capsule Sputnik
was launched in 1957, people became more interested in science and scientists
started listening to Berenice Abbott. This picture illustrating a pendulum
appeared in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space,
a book about physics published in 1969.

Abbott cropped the photo to give it long, slender edges that complement
the hanging ball. Determined to prove that a photograph could document
scientific fact as well as communicate the beauty of science, she wrote,
"The scientific photographs had to be carefully composed, but they
couldnt look that way. I didnt want the composition to be so obvious as
to take over . . . when you look at a photograph and all you can see is
the composition then you know it is a big flop." (Hank O'Neal, Berenice
Abbott American Photographer, 1982)